


the boy you've ever been

by TheAnswerIsDawn



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Custom Shepard (Mass Effect), Destroy Ending, Everyone except Hannah and Shepard are only briefly mentioned, Gen, M/M, Post-Mass Effect 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 11:39:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18409880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAnswerIsDawn/pseuds/TheAnswerIsDawn
Summary: Sitting in the oppressive silence of the Comm Room, waiting for the call that will tell her if she has lost her son for the second time in four years, Rear Admiral Hannah Shepard remembers Matt as he used to be.





	the boy you've ever been

_There are times life will rattle your bones_  
_And will bend your limbs,_  
_You're still far away the boy you've ever been,_  
_So you bend back and shake at the frame_  
_Of the frame you made,_  
_But don't you shake alone  
_ _Please Avery, come home_

 - The Decemberists

  

* * *

 

Sitting in the oppressive silence of the Comm Room, waiting for the call that will tell her if she has lost her son for the second time in four years, Rear Admiral Hannah Shepard remembers Matt as he used to be: at three, waving at passers-by from his perch on Jon’s shoulders, just days before the First Contact War and the promotion that spelled the beginning of the end for her marriage. At five, all big eyes and messy hair, nose pressed to the observation deck window as Arcturus Station floated into view beneath them. At seven, with scabs on his knees and a cast still on his arm, grinning gap-toothed and apologetic from the docking bay railings.

By the time he’d turned eleven he’d been two inches taller than all his peers, and still unused to limbs grown as gangly as a Salarian’s. Hannah had spent her leave patching shirts and letting down hems; Jon had spent his on Earth, and Matt’s face had turned solemn when he thought she wasn’t looking. She still can’t decide if the silence hurt more than the shouting, but it was the moment she started seriously considering a divorce.

She has no memory of Matt’s thirteenth birthday, lost in a haze of drugs and the sharp smell of medi-gel after the longest but not yet worst tour of her career, but fourteen will always be clear in her memory: new home, new school, new friends to make (and old ones to lose, but nothing was quite as hard as losing a father). That was the year she’d taught him how to throw a proper punch, insurance against evenings spent with split lips and bloodied knuckles, because some kids had been beating on a little Asari girl, and it didn’t matter that she wasn’t human, it _just wasn’t right_. She’d made him swear blind never to throw the first punch, never to fight except in the defence of those who couldn’t defend themselves, and, fingers white-knuckled on the comm panel, she finds herself wishing for one horrible selfish moment that he hadn’t learned that lesson quite so well. Except there’s a whole galaxy out there that’s still alive because of him, and how can her heart be anything but proud? He’s her son.

_He’s my son too,_ Jon had yelled at her almost a year later, one last argument before the divorce papers had been signed. Afterwards she’d found Matt curled up in his bunk, working his way through an endless stack of old sci-fi novels, the ones she used to read to him when he was little. His face when he looked up at her had been all Jon’s, but the eyes were hers, and the sad little smile he gave her was as familiar as her own reflection. The next day, they’d logged onto the extranet together and changed his surname to Shepard.

He’d grown up so quickly, her son, and she thinks of him again at sixteen, skinny wrists trembling with the recoil of her service pistol as he emptied round after round into the targets, solemn-faced and somehow years older than he’d been six months before. She’d been back on Arcturus less than a week after Mindoir when he’d cornered her and firmly insisted that she teach him how to shoot, and she’d taken one look at the stubborn set of his jaw and acquiesced. By the time her next leave had come around, she’d been unsurprised to find him holding his own on the range against a whole squad of recruits, never mind that he had two years of school left before he could enlist.

She still keeps the pictures from his High School graduation on her desk, still baby-faced at barely eighteen and with his hair already buzzed for Basic, and next to it the photo he had sent her fifteen months later from Rio, suffused with a quiet pride that the new hollows in his cheeks had been unable to hide.

She tries not to remember him at twenty-three, pale and blank-eyed in a hospital bed, his body wrapped in burns and breaking beneath the weight of fifty-one soldiers who hadn’t walked beside him out of Akuze. But clear in her mind is the smile that had almost brought her to tears, months later as he laughed with her for the first time from his temporary apartment on Arcturus, whole star systems between them as they chatted over the comms. And she’ll never forget the way he’d looked at twenty-four, dashing in his Dress Blues as Commander Anderson shook his hand. At twenty-five, the scars barely an afterthought, no longer lurid where they showed above his collar.

She hadn’t been there when the Council made him a Spectre, but she imagines his expression anyway, the struggle to conceal his dismay as the weight settled heavy on his shoulders, borne down by the knowledge that this was so much greater than him. He’d been hoping to make Captain, she knows, but not like this, not at the expense of the man who had handed him his N7, who had seen him at his lowest and rather than turn away, had taken him by the hand and told him he was worthy. Who had become the father he no longer had.

But perhaps he had been proud, too, that Anderson had trusted him to do it right. _She_ had been proud, too.

And then he’d been dead.

Hannah closes her eyes against the memory, Hackett’s face blue and distorted in the privacy of the Comm Room as he spoke the words she’d spent eleven years dreading to hear. 

_(I regret to inform you that your son Commander John Matthew Shepard was killed in action at 10:51 Galactic Standard Time, during an unprovoked attack on the SSV Normandy by an unknown vessel in the Amada System. Commander Shepard was assisting with the evacuation of crew members when the SSV Normandy experienced a serious hull breach, and was unable to reach an escape pod. I extend my deepest sympathy to you in your loss.)_

Except he hadn’t died, had he, or he’d been brought back, and Hannah doesn’t know what she’ll do if she has to listen to those words a second time. It’s unthinkable, and yet -  

Most people don’t get a second chance.

No, most people don’t get a second chance, and surely no one gets a third, but _God in heaven if anyone does let it be him_. Let her see Matt at thirty-three, at sixty-three, at ninety-three, with grey in his hair and laughter lines at the corner of his eyes. Let her stand beside him and smile through her tears as he marries Major Alenko, grinning like a schoolboy and not the old soldier that he is. Let her hold him in her arms and tell him that she’s proud of him, that she loves him, that she’s always loved him.

Let this not be the end.  

Hannah flinches at the crackle and buzz of the comm as it lights up, the hologram leaving rippling shadows on the wall. She stares, just for a moment, at Hackett’s face, blue and distorted in the privacy of the Comm Room, and her breath catches high in her throat.

But just for a moment.

She answers the comm.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title and epigraph from Dear Avery by The Decemberists


End file.
